It is amazing how much money
Zynga
have been able to make from some of the simplest game ideas, despite their recent financial woes. They really have a knack for taking an existing idea, adding a social component and making a stack on it.

That said, Running with Friends was a weird concept to me. It came out in January this year and is one of those games where your character just runs and runs through an obstacle course, a bit like the running of the bulls in Pamplona.

Your runner moves faster the longer you stay on the course and you have to break items, collect stars and most importantly avoid getting gored by bulls. It was surprisingly fun.

It does suffer from one flaw, in common with most social turn-based games: the wait for an opponent. Sometimes you’re lucky and there’s a bunch of people online when you want to play; sometimes you “start" five games and have to wait an hour till someone joins.

The ads aren’t too invasive, which I always appreciate in a free game. It did crash once. It works on Apple and Android

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While some of the big guys have a formula for success,
Backflip Studios
really spread the creativity around. The makers of the simulation “breed your own dragon" game DragonVale have a pretty extensive and diverse catalogue of games under their belt. This week I downloaded, and loved, Outworded. It’s a free word-search, pure and simple, but the game-play is clean and easy to understand. You can adjust the difficulty level to your liking and you can challenge others to play against you – who can solve the puzzle the fastest? If no challengers are available you can play against yourself.

It’s a well-made game, pure and simple. Unfortunately the advertising is very invasive, a full screen pops up between every game. That made me a little grumpy.

But it was still an excellent execution. It’s Apple only.

AFR rating: 4/5

Now Dots: A Game About Connecting (
Betaworks One
) is only multiplayer in a play-and-pass sense – there’s no online social component – but it’s still an interesting concept. You’re presented with a screen of different coloured dots and you have to connect them horizontally and/or vertically to remove them from the page. They are then replaced by other dots and you repeat until the timer runs out. It’s by no means a complicated game but a great quick-play time-filler. Of course, you can play it by yourself as well.

A lot of complaints about the “update" for iPad, which reduced the size of the game screen for some inexplicable reason, but it’s perfect on a phone.